Conceptual Knowledge Acquisition: Challenges, Opportunities, and Use Cases

Organizers:

• Tom Hanika, University of Hildesheim
• Sergei Obiedkov, TU Dresden
• Bernhard Ganter, Ernst-Schröder-Zentrum, Darmstadt

Keywords and Topics

• Knowledge Acquisition and Capture
• Conceptual Exploration
• Design Patterns and Paradigmatic Examples
• Successful use cases and real-world applications
• Challenges and lessons learned
• Application principles
• Missing theoretical foundations
• Missing technical infrastructure
• Integration with other theories and technologies

Content

Formal concept analysis (FCA) can help make sense of data and the underlying domain – provided the data is not too big, not too noisy, representative of the domain, and if there is data in the first place. What if you don’t have such data readily available but are prepared to invest in collecting it and have access to domain experts or other reliable queryable sources of information? Conceptual exploration comes to the rescue!

Conceptual exploration is a family of knowledge-acquisition techniques within FCA. The goal is to build a complete implicational theory of a domain (with respect to a fixed language) by posing queries to a domain expert. When properly implemented, it is a great tool that can help organize the process of scientific discovery.

Unfortunately, proper implementations are scarce and success stories of using conceptual exploration are somewhat rare and limited in scope. With this workshop, we intend to analyze the situation and, maybe, find a solution.

If
  • you succeeded in acquiring new knowledge about or building a satisfying conceptual representation of some domain with conceptual exploration before;
  • you attempted conceptual exploration in application to your problem but failed miserably;
  • you want to use conceptual exploration to analyze some domain, but you don’t know where and how to start;
  • you have alternatives to conceptual exploration;
then come to the workshop to share your experiences, insights, ideas, and concerns with us!

Duration, Format, and Dates

• Participants submit their proposition in the form of an extended abstract of typically up to 2-pages until 2024-07-10 via tom.hanika@uni-hildesheim.de.
• In addition to that supplementary material, such as data sets, descriptions, visualizations, may be included into the submission.
• The workshop is planned for 1/2 day and consists of a small number short presentation; each case is followed by a plenary discussion.
• If insecure if your proposition or topic matches, feel encouraged to contact the organizers.